Writing a Great Medical CV

By Hannah Brown in Career development on Friday, June 12, 2009 @ 10:08

Despite the advent of application forms, curriculum vitaes are here to stay – at least in some form or another. During your Foundation Years, you have a unique and perfect opportunity to bolster your CV – which will stand you in good stead for many years to come.

Most doctors think of a CV as something that you throw together a day or two before applying for a job, and so spend little time preparing what goes into it. This can lead to poor preparation for jobs, interviews, and even lead to a lack of focus on weaker areas in your career. 

To use an old cliché – ‘if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail’ and so do make a CV, and start as early as you can – if you haven’t been building a CV since starting medical school, then start now! 

Your CV will be able to:

· Demonstrate you, your personality and interests - what you want people to know about you other than just being a doctor

· Collect your thoughts and ideas about your career progression and help you identify areas that are strong and areas that might need work! (such as research, audit, presentations)

· Help you remember what you have achieved – it can be difficult remembering past glories if you leave it to the last minute

· Help you fill out application forms – information can be easily transferred from your CV into different application forms

· Apply for other things outside the world of job applications – for study grants, courses, which may be based on competitive entry

· Help you devise a portfolio of your achievements for those all important ST/GP applications and interviews

Once you have built your CV, you must then update it regularly to keep it fresh and relevant to the point in your career. 

Opinions on what makes a great CV vary from author to author, which explains the many heterogenous medical CVs there are.  Once yours is written, get mates, seniors, anyone, to check it for you, for grammar, content, and anything that might be ambiguous, arrogant or make you sound dangerous.